


the middle of the bed

by haljake



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Slice of Life, au where talking to dirk actually does help, epic divorce man vs undefeated broken heart king, ex johnroxy and dirkjake, look i'm going through something ok, non-sburb AU, rated for language and horizontal couch kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 11:24:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21135932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haljake/pseuds/haljake
Summary: John's new neighbor has some surprisingly helpful ideas for getting over his divorce.





	the middle of the bed

There’s fly shit on the ceiling.

John didn’t know that flies shit. He still doesn’t know for sure, didn’t bother to look it up -- it just seems logical, now. They have to consume something to stay alive, and that something has to come out of them again in some way. So flies probably shit.

He took the trash out yesterday. Managed, finally, to take the bag out of the bin and put it outside, and then put the bin in the shower and rinse out all the fly eggs. Eggs, is that right? They weren’t wiggly yet. John figures they were eggs. So most of them went down the drain before they could hatch, but he had their parents in his kitchen for a while, sitting on the walls and the ceiling and fornicating and shitting.

There’s little spots on the ceiling, dark brown on white. John’s pretty sure that’s shit. He’s not sure how to get it off; he’ll have to get a ladder from Home Depot, or something. He doesn’t have one here, even though he knows there was one in the garage of the house he and Roxy bought. But he didn’t think to take it with him when he moved out, and the idea of driving there and getting it so he can get the fly shit off his ceiling feels even more insurmountable than the ordeal of driving to Home Depot and buying a new one.

He’ll look into it tomorrow, maybe. If he can work up the strength to put pants on.

When John takes his glasses off and puts them on the nightstand, the spots on the ceiling are gone. There. Problem solved. Astigmatism saves the day once again.

Something thuds to the floor in his upstairs neighbor’s apartment. John closes his eyes. He’s on the edge of his bed, one arm outstretched to the other half, the empty half, of it -- in yesterday’s shirt and boxers, scratchy socks, hair greasy, teeth not brushed. He shouldn’t go to sleep like this, he knows, because he will just feel worse in the morning, but he’s just so tired, he just wants to.

Thud.

John didn’t consciously seek this out. The man with the stubbly beard lying on a bed alone in his underwear after his spouse divorced him, staring at dirt and listening to other people make noise. He wasn’t looking for it, but it found him anyway. It’s not a shitty apartment. It’s poorly lit right now, but that’s because he keeps his blinds closed and hasn’t yet managed to install a ceiling light. Again, no ladder. Clearly, it’s not soundproof, and it’s not the first time he’s hearing weird thuds from upstairs, but he can deal. Whoever lives up there, John doesn’t hear them walk around or talk or make music or anything, so he’s fine with the occasional noise.

Thud.

It’s not a bad place. John is just having a bad time.

He closes his eyes and figures, as tired as he feels, he should probably manage to fall asleep even with the noises.

Thud. Thud.

Any minute now.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Okay.

John opens his eyes again, and rolls on his side before sitting up and putting his glasses back on. That way he didn’t have a clear view of the ceiling with its fly shit stains. It’s all about fooling your own mind, he thinks.

If the thudding isn’t stopping anytime soon, John figures, he might as well stay up a bit longer and do some very basic hygiene. If nothing else can motivate him, maybe whatever the fuck the people upstairs are doing can. He puts his clothes in the laundry basket, he takes a long shower, he even conditions his hair. He doesn’t shave, because he kind of likes the rugged look it’s giving him, but he moisturizes and he brushes his teeth. He thinks about putting fresh sheets on the bed, even, but by the time he comes out of his bathroom again, his bones feel heavy from exhaustion, and the thudding has stopped.

He curls up on the side of the bed, and even though he expects to stay awake pointlessly for at least another hour, he falls asleep within minutes.

  
  


The next day, John decides to greet his thudding neighbor. Initially, he had fantasized about introducing himself to more of his neighbors, the ones next door, maybe several more on his floor, and the ones underneath him. In those fantasies he always had a basket of handmade baked goods and looked his best.

He stands around in his kitchen for a while, trying to work up the will to bake. Brownies, or something. Simple, basic stuff he’s been making since he was three feet tall. But he ends up just standing there, looking vacantly at the stove, until so much time has passed that he’d feel silly about starting now.

He puts on his pants and goes outside to get donuts. That should count for something, he thinks. The fresh air is nice, and everyone likes donuts. Maybe that’ll even make him look like less of a suck-up than showing up with his own brownies.

The sign above the doorbell upstairs says Strider. John doesn’t know anything about his upstairs neighbor, or neighbors. He’s barely seen anyone in the short time he’s lived here, and if he did, he didn’t know what apartment they belong to. The place, John thinks, isn’t so tiny that only one person could live there. If two people really loved each other they could surely make it work.

It takes a while for his neighbor Strider to open the door, so long that John is already considering going back down and eating all the donuts himself. When the door does open, it reveals a tall guy about John’s age, wearing a tank top, a towel around his shower-wet neck, and a politely confused look. He doesn’t say anything.

John says, “Hi! I’m John, I recently moved in downstairs.” He did not plan any further than that, so he just extends the box of donuts in front of him. “Thought I’d say hello. Do you like donuts?”

Mister Strider eyes the box of donuts for a moment that’s just a little too long to feel natural, then takes it. “Sure,” he says. He balances it on one hand and opens it with the other to inspect the loot, which probably means that they’re not going to be shaking hands. Okeydoke. His neighbor says, “Dirk.”

“Huh?” John says. Dirk looks up from the donuts, closes the box, and gives him another one of those weirdly long looks. His eyes look like actual amber, the color. That is so wild.

“My name,” he says. “It’s Dirk.”

“Oh!” John says, and gives a laugh. “Sorry. I’m kind of slow, but maybe it’s best you find out early. Hi Dirk, good to meet you!”

“Yeah,” Dirk says slowly. John watches one of the tattoos on his naked arm get smushed as he leans against the doorframe. “You from here, John?”

“Not by birth. But I’ve been living here for a few years, I just moved across town.”

Dirk nods, still looking at him, and John senses very suddenly where this is going. He has time for one brief moment of hoping that it won’t, then Dirk says, “Changed jobs?”

It’s none of his business, really, and John can’t imagine that he’ll be heartbroken if John just says  _ no _ and leaves it at that. They only just met, and he seems like a chill guy. John doesn’t have to tell the truth, but his mouth turns into a defeated smile anyway. “No,” he says. “Breakup.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Dirk says. He doesn’t sound sorry at all, but John doesn’t hold it against him. Again, they only just met, and also, Dirk’s voice sounds like it has the same range as Google Sam.

John shrugs. “Thanks,” he says. This has been weird with everyone. People express condolences like someone died, and John accepts them like someone died. It doesn’t exactly feel right, but he also doesn’t know what else they’re all supposed to do. He’s trying to come up with more things for smalltalk, but is thrown off when Dirk looks him over from toe to head, then looks at his donuts, then casts a brief glance over his shoulder, into his apartment.

Dirk asks, “Wanna come in for a beer?”

This is a lot farther than John thought he would get, with just a box of donuts. “Sure!” he says, and dooms himself.

Dirk’s apartment is cut the same way John’s is, but looks way different. He has no yet-to-be-unpacked boxes, for one. There’s posters on the wall, ticket stubs tacked to a corkboard over a desk with three computer monitors. It’s untidy in a way that makes it look lived in but not gross, and all John can think of is, Good for him. He wonders where the occasional thudding comes from, and finds a corner with heavy looking barbells and a yoga mat. Maybe it’s him working out, then.

They sit on a couch facing a TV that has Crunchyroll open on it, and Dirk asks if he should put anything on as background noise. He adds that he also has Netflix “and shit,” but John gives a bemused little smile and says that he doesn’t mind some good old anime. He hasn’t watched any in years, but made up people talking in a language he doesn’t understand sounds like pretty good background noise for more smalltalk, actually. Dirk hands him a beer and then reaches over John’s lap to grab the remote.

Two random Naruto episodes in, John has found out that Dirk moved here from Houston, has two brothers, and some sort of engineering degree that John immediately forgot about again. Dirk knows that John is from Washington, that his dad died when he was a teenager, that he has a half sister who lives on the other end of the world, that he illegally kept a pet rabbit in college, that he went to college three times before he actually managed to finish a degree, and that he married his second college sweetheart even though he’d liked highschool sweetheart stories more. Dirk also knows that in highschool, John thought girls were stupid.

Desperately, John tries to find more topics to talk about that will actually get information out of Dirk and not his own stupid dumb mouth, but Dirk keeps handing him more beer and putting on more Naruto, and it’s starting to get a little hard to concentrate.

“I just wanted something normal,” John says, drunk, shoes off, feet on Dirk’s cluttered coffee table. People on TV are yelling in Japanese. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he’s watching anyway. “A wife and a house -- I grew up behind a white picket fence, Dirk, literally, I just wanted that again. I don’t think that’s so bad. I think I just wanted to be my dad, only with the added bonus of being married, and I wanted the house and the son and now I don’t have shit. I don’t blame them. Roxy -- I don’t blame them. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, you know? You hear that all the time. I know they like me a lot, and I like them a lot too, but I don’t think either of us really liked the other enough. I think we just really wanted to get married. Like, to anyone. I think we were just at the right place at the right time back then, so we just did it, and we tried really hard to make it work, too. But I guess sometimes it just doesn’t.”

Dirk says, “Mhm.”

John takes another swig and says, “That’s normal too. Getting divorced. Probably getting divorced is more normal than getting married. Does that make sense, like, mathematically? I don’t know. But this is all just like in the movies. The dude fucks up and moves out and gets a shitty apartment where he hangs out in tighty-whities. Walter White did it best I think, but I’m not going to make meth. I don’t have to fight for custody or anything either, so that’s good. We’re all still friends, I can still see him. Sometimes he’s the only reason I shave in the morning, you know? Hey, can I have another beer?”

“Sure,” Dirk says.

“If Sasuke was ginger he’d look a lot like you.”

“Thanks.”

John sniffs. “It’s okay. Me, I mean. You looking like Sasuke is also okay though. It’s alright I think. I could have it so much worse. It’s just… I was so sure. You know, Dirk? I thought I had it, I had it figured out, I had my house and my picket fence and my happy marriage. I had a car and like, a pressure cooker. I wear ties to work; I thought this was it. I was  _ so sure, _ is all. And now it’s like, it isn’t even bad, they’re still my friend and I have a great son and I found a good apartment that’s even closer to work, but I just can’t… It feels like I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that I’m not going to have all that anymore? And I get scared sometimes. Like I blew my shot. I dunno. I think I had too much beer.”

Dirk has only just opened the new bottle John asked for two breaths prior. It took him several attempts, which is John’s only way to be sure that he’s also a little smashed. “Do you want this or nah,” he says.

“Ugh, whatever,” John says, and takes it. He drinks, and burps, and says, “I miss them. That’s stupid. Because it’s not even romantic or anything. I don’t even think I still love them, and I’m actually not really sure when I last did? But I’m just so used to having them around. And they’re not  _ gone _ gone now, but they’re… Gone.”

“Yeah,” Dirk says. “Hey, this fight is iconic. Watch this.”

John squints his eyes at the TV, and puts his feet off the coffee table to lean forward instead. Naruto swims in and out of focus, like he’s not wearing his glasses, even though he knows he is. He can see the frames in the periphery of his vision, also blurry. “I haven’t seen this in fifteen years,” John says.

Next to him, Dirk also leans forward. His naked shoulder bumps into the sleeve of John’s polo, and the outsides of their thighs touch. John looks at him from the side, and notices for the first time that he has a light dust of freckles over his cheekbone. He wonders why he can see that so clearly but barely figure out what’s going on on this huge television.

Dirk’s arm flexes a bit when he lifts his bottle to his mouth. “It’s so good,” he says. John can’t remember what he was talking about before.

  
  


He remembers when he wakes up the morning after. His bedroom swims into poor focus as he sits up in his bed, blanket pooling in his naked lap. He squints at the wall, blind without his glasses, trying to remember how he got here.

His neighbor helped him, of course. His neighbor Dirk helped him down the stairs with his arm around John’s waist and John’s arm around his shoulders, because neither of them trusted John to get down there alone without falling. Because they got drunk, together. Because John had gone to introduce himself to the man living upstairs, and…

Oh, no.

John puts both hands over his eyes and squeezes them shut, forcing himself to remember now, even though his mind screams at him not to. He wasn’t black out drunk, so it’s all still there, it just doesn’t want to be found. Dirk helped him down here and stayed until they were both sure that John had put the right key into the right keyhole and managed to actually open the door. He didn’t come in here with him. So that’s good.

Dirk might have gotten an enormous earful of John’s divorce troubles, but at least he didn’t see the fly shit on the ceiling.

John wanted to be in bed, and he wanted to be naked for it. He remembers that, too. So he wrestled his heavy body out of all of his clothes and climbed in, and he felt really good. Warm and nice and comfortable, as if he hadn’t just spent a painful amount of time telling a  _ random man _ about his  _ divorce. _

“Oh, god,” John says, weakly, into the solitude of his bedroom.

Upstairs, something thuds against the floor. Oh, god. Oh, god, he’ll never be able to face him again. He’s just going to have to live underneath his weird thudding apartment forever and never ever talk to him again, and never look at him, and pray to whatever deity is in charge that they won’t meet in the hallway.

Some breakfast and brushed teeth later, John decides that that’s really overdramatic and that is not who he is as a person. John decides to make cookies.

Dirk ate half of the donuts he brought yesterday, and John wolfed down the other half, so he assumes that Dirk doesn’t mind sweet stuff and doesn’t have some sort of complicated diet or whatever. And if John’s grandma has taught him one thing, it’s that cookies make a great apology. Well, mostly she taught him that cookies make a great weapon and several great pranks, but sometimes they’re also good for apologies.

He doesn’t have any flour left, so John showers and gets dressed and goes outside to buy flour. When he returns home, he goes right for the kitchen, and gets to work, and he makes a full batch of cookies, and he sits down afterwards and looks at his oven and thinks,  _ Huh. _

Looks like nothing fuels his productivity quite like the humiliation of opening up over beer and Naruto.

The harder part comes afterwards, when he has to take the neat plate of cookies and walk upstairs with it, and stand in front of Dirk’s door and wonder what the hell to say. It’s not like Dirk was trying to stop him, at least John can’t remember any instance of that. But maybe he was just trying to be polite. What John did was goofy at best, and a poor first impression definitely. He’d love to remedy that, but the prospect of looking at Dirk’s face and having to come up with words doesn’t make him feel like he will. If anything, he might just say more stupid things.

Instead of ringing the doorbell, John turns around and goes back downstairs with his cookies. He finds a piece of paper and a pen, and wonders some more about what to say. He’s not a wordy person, usually. He sure was last night, but he’s not  _ good _ with words, he doesn’t know how to make them sound smart. So John just uses the entire piece of paper for one word, and writes,

**sorry!!!**

He puts it underneath the plate of cookies when he leaves it in front of Dirk’s door, then rings the doorbell and bolts back down the stairs. Is Dirk home? Hopefully. He did hear a thud earlier, so there is a good chance his cookies won’t dry out outside his apartment door.

Either way, John is not going to check. He’s way too embarrassed to do that. Instead, he puts on his jacket and goes to work late, and tries not to think about it anymore.

  
  


It’s a perfectly nondescript office gig, where people have cubicles and put yogurt with name tags in the fridge. Sometimes John even holds smalltalk with people at the watercooler. Most of the time it allows him to come and go whenever he wants, even work from home for days when his body can’t remember how to put on pants without wanting to cry, as long as all the data is in the right place at the end of the day. It’s like what Chandler from  _ Friends _ did, kind of. Just what John had always wanted.

It’s just mindless enough to make him forget about his blunders until the very second he sets foot in the apartment building again. His body very badly wants him to go up the stairs one more floor, just to see, just to check if Dirk got his cookies, but his mind is a coward and doesn’t dare to.

John opens his apartment door and steps in, and almost slips on a piece of paper on the floor. Swearing, he turns on the light, and leans down to check what the hell happened there.

It’s a little post-it note, right in his entryway, almost like someone slid it in underneath his door while he was away. In neat handwriting, it reads,

**No worries.**   
**Been there.**   
**Learn to sleep in the**   
**middle of the bed.**

John stands in his apartment, holding the note in one hand, looking from it to the bed, then back at the note, and back at the bed. Has he… Has he not been sleeping in the middle of the bed? He guesses he can’t have been, because there is no pillow in the middle. He has two pillows still, and one big blanket, because that’s just what an adult king size bed should look like, to John. It would be weird to only have one pillow in the middle of a two person bed, right?

He sleeps on the left side of the bed every night, he realizes. His side. Sometimes he stretches his right arm out to the other side, and he acts like it’s just so he can stretch, but he doesn’t know if that’s true.

He’s been leaving room for someone who isn’t there.

Slowly, still holding the note, John walks to the other side of his bed and takes the second pillow. He’s never been one for excessive or decorative pillows, so he doesn’t know what to do with it. For a few seconds, he just holds it at arm length, like a cat swinging at him. Then he drops it to the floor.

The bed does look weird with only his single pillow in the middle. John puts Dirk’s note down on the nightstand and leaves to brush his teeth, and when he comes back, it still looks oddly empty. But, John supposes, it is that. It’s an oddly empty king size bed, and he will have to get used to it.

When he crawls in, he expects the mattress to dip in the wrong places, like it already got used to his shape being only on the left side of it. That’s idiotic, of course, since he bought this thing when he moved in here, so, only a couple of weeks ago. He can lie down in the middle of it just fine.

He pulls the blanket up to his chin and looks at a different spot on the ceiling than last night, just slightly to the right, with different fly shit stains, and he wonders how long it’s going to take him to fall asleep like this. Then he falls asleep.

  
  


It takes him another full day to get back at Dirk. John doesn’t usually have much trouble talking to people, as he has shown his poor neighbor on Dirk’s couch. He’s not good with words, but he’s fine at conversation, because they are two different things, and you don’t need to be smart for one of them. You just need to be a little more extroverted than all of your friends, and John is fine at that most of the time.

He also doesn’t usually overthink things, but the more time he spends alone in this new strange apartment, the more often he falls victim to it. The “Been there” line from Dirk’s note just won’t leave him alone -- the idea that Dirk might have gone through this himself was comforting at first, but now John is kind of mortified by it. Surely Dirk carried himself better; surely Dirk figured out the bed trick all by himself, and surely Dirk is long over all the silly things John is feeling right now.

So it’s tough to regain the guts to talk to him again, so much so that John opts for another note. And why not? Dirk could have come by before, and decided to slide something in under his door instead, so maybe he’s perfectly fine with this way of communication. John sure is. Anything that will keep him from being subjected to another one of those long, amber stares. He doesn’t even ring the doorbell this time, just slides his message in and leaves for work.

**that really helped!**   
**sadly i will never be able to look you**   
**in the eyes again. but thanks anyway!**

  
  


Life goes on after that. John doesn’t hear from his neighbor with the amber eyes and the shower wet hair and the tank top for days, and he assumes that their transaction is now complete. Dirk got some free food and gave him advice in return, and John sleeps in the middle of the bed now and absolutely humiliated himself in front of someone who lives very close to him.

It’s okay. John focuses on himself. He goes to work more instead of working from home. He throws out some old clothes and gets new ones instead to make himself feel fresher. He shaves, he sees his son. He buys a ceiling lamp to make his apartment less gloomy, but forgets to also buy a ladder, and doesn’t have the energy to go back to the store afterwards. The ceiling lamp sits in a corner of his bedroom, and John sleeps in the middle of the bed.

There’s another thing that sticks with him, from Dirk’s note that’s still on his bedside table. Whenever John gets frustrated because he sleeps here now and he still feels like garbage, he looks at it and remembers,  _ Learn to sleep in the middle of the bed. _

Learn.

John has never been the fastest learner, and sometimes, when things pissed him off enough, he would just give up. But he understands that this one takes time. And he understands that this one might just be worth it in the end. So he keeps practicing. He buys proper pyjamas, just to feel good. He learns.

He thinks about Dirk when there’s thuds from upstairs. John doesn’t know what sort of workout he would be doing if it was that. Throwing barbells to the floor? Maybe he plays basketball in his apartment, and dribbles the ball in wildly irregular rhythms. He can’t go up there and ask, and so he tries to make peace with it instead. The thudding is now a welcome part of is routine -- it’s not there every day, but often enough to make him smile sometimes. It’s a sign of life, at least, to let him know that Dirk is still up there somewhere, probably not thinking about John and his marital problems at all.

About a week in, someone knocks on his apartment door. They don’t use the doorbell, which John thinks is pretty weird, but it stops being surprising the exact second he opens the door and sees Dirk.

“Oh,” John says, his mind immediately racing behind him, trying to figure out if his apartment looks anywhere near presentable. Does  _ he _ look presentable? He went to work earlier, so he can’t look too terrible. Is he wearing pants? He thinks he is. “Hi, Dirk.”

Dirk doesn’t greet him back, but instead holds out a clean, empty plate towards him and says, “Figured you might want this back.”

John looks down at it for a solid few seconds until he realizes that this is his, and it’s the one he put all those cookies on when he left them on Dirk’s doorstep. He’s been so busy feeling embarrassed and figuring out where to sleep since then, he didn’t even realize he was missing a plate. “Oh!” he says again, and gingerly takes it in his hands. It looks squeaky clean and briefly, John entertains the thought that it took Dirk so long to return it because he was furiously scrubbing it for days on end. “Thank you. Uh…” When he looks up from it, Dirk is still standing there, politely silent, but not looking in a hurry to bolt up the stairs. He’s not laughing at John, which is nice, but then again, John doesn’t remember ever having seen him laugh, so maybe it’s not saying much. Either way, he’s here, and the Earth hasn’t yet opened up to swallow John whole. He says, “Do you want to come in for a bit?”

“Yeah,” Dirk says, so quickly that it makes John smile. He steps aside to let him in, and only then remembers that he has poop stains on the bedroom ceiling and a lamp sitting in a box on the floor. The only things that are looking good and properly set up are his TV set and the kitchen. At least, this means he has a couch he can offer Dirk.

But instead of sitting, with a bemused look on his face, Dirk puts his hands in his pockets and takes in everything else that still looks like John moved in here yesterday. His head falls back, and he inspects the unused lamp cable on the ceiling, and John tries not to cringe. “Doesn’t it get dark in here?”

It is already fairly dark in here, being late in the afternoon, but John shrugs helplessly. “Haven’t, uh, gotten around to putting the lamp up there yet,” he says. Dirk’s gaze follows his arm when he points towards the lamp on the floor, and John adds quietly, “Forgot to take the ladder with me for the move.”

“Thought you’re on good terms,” Dirk says. “Wouldn’t they just give it to you?”

John clears his throat. “I haven’t asked.”

Instead of judging him for his cowardice, Dirk grunts a “Hm” and gives him another one of those inscrutable looks. “I got a ladder upstairs,” he says. “We can get this done no problem.”

“Oh!” John says, feeling an odd type of warm in his chest. “If it’s no trouble, that would be great. I can put up a lamp just fine on my own, really, I do just need a ladder--okay.”

Dirk is already moving back towards the apartment door, with a sense of purpose in his stride that’s the first thing John has seen on him that actually translates as a sign of good mood. “No big,” Dirk says and waves over his shoulder. “See you in a sec.”

“Okay,” John says again. He smiles after him, all the way until Dirk is out the door and he remembers the fly shit on his ceiling. John looks up, at the little specks all around the cables, and says, “Shit.”

They are still there, of course, when Dirk returns with his ladder. It’s a big one, one that reaches almost all the way up to the ceiling itself, when surely a stepladder would have done the trick. Maybe Dirk doesn’t have a stepladder. Dirk seems like the kind of person who only owns the most extra version of things.

John has gathered necessary tools in the meantime, and he grabs them and the lamp and moves towards the ladder, but by the time he gets there, Dirk is already on it. “I can do it myself,” John repeats, but Dirk doesn’t even dignify that with a response. He just looks down at him with one hand outstretched, waiting to be handed the lamp. John rolls his eyes. “Seriously, it’s my apartment.”

“Look, I’m already up here,” Dirk says and wiggles his fingers. “You can either waste time chasing me back down and getting up yourself, or you can just gimme your damn lamp.”

“You are such an ass,” John says, and is surprised to find his own words laced with just a hint of affection. He tries and fails not to stare at the twitch of the corners of Dirk’s mouth when he hands him the lamp.

Dirk works as fast as he works unorthodoxically, as far as John is concerned. Most of the home improvement things John has learned, he learned from his father. Meanwhile, Dirk seems like he learned how to fix a light from about three YouTube videos that all contradicted each other, but in the end somehow found a kind of middle way. When John flips the switch, eventually, the light works, so he guesses that’s all he needs to care about.

“Thanks,” he says, hoping to get Dirk back down quickly enough to prevent the inevitable, and then losing that hope half a second later. Dirk is still on the ladder, squinting at the ceiling, picking at one of the spots with the tip of his finger.

“What is this?” he asks. John’s instincts want him to take a step away from Dirk, like he expects to be hit over the head with a drill any second now. But he stands his ground.

“Fly shit, I think.”

Dirk continues poking at it. “Could probably get that off with some Windex,” he says. “Or just paint over it.”

“Dude,” John says. “Gross.”

Dirk shrugs. “Whatever works, man. Not like it smells or anything.”

“Yeah, I guess it doesn’t,” John says, relieved at finally watching Dirk climb down. Then, embarrassment catches right back up with him when Dirk looks around and his gaze lands on the bed. The weird, king size bed with the single pillow in the middle. Dirk looks back at him.

“How you been?”

“Good,” John says immediately. “Better. I mean -- good. You know, it’s not like I was bad before, I was just, uh, pretty drunk and kind of exhausted and such. I’m -- good. And you?”

“Fine,” Dirk says. He’s not laughing at John, not even really smiling, not quite, and John still feels like there is distinct amusement etched into his face somehow. He has no idea how he does it. Dirk continues standing there, one of his feet up on the lowest rung of the ladder for what John can only assume is the mere purpose of having a cool looking magazine-worthy pose going on while standing right underneath his new light. With a tilt of his head and a tone of voice that makes the words sound perfectly casual, Dirk asks, “Have you gone unhinged yet?”

John gives him a moment of silence, thinking that maybe he’ll explain himself. But he doesn’t. “What?”

“You know. Off the shits,” Dirk says, like that explains anything. “Made an ill-advised purchase. Put a marble horse statue in your too narrow bathroom. Called into work for a month to go to the airport and take the first flight they let you board? Fucked a stranger? Got a wacky body mod? Escalation, John.”

Slowly, John raises a hand to scratch at his cheek, listening to his nails rasp over the stubble there. “You mean… a mid-life crisis?”

For a split second, Dirk looks like he might kill him. “No,” he says. “You’re not fifty.”

“You think I’ll make it to one hundred? That’s exciting.”

“I-- Look, I was just asking. It’s just something a lot of people do, I think, after a divorce.” Dirk shrugs, and once more looks around John’s sort of barren abode. “You don’t seem like you’ve gone off the rails any. Pretty sure a divorce is, like, a free pass to do that at least once. Helps you with figuring out actual good things to do solo, I’d wager.”

“Hey,” John says, grinning. “Don’t think I forgot that your note said  _ Been there. _ You can stop saying  _ I’d wager _ and  _ I think _ and all that stuff, I know you’re speaking from experience! Must’ve been some derailment, huh?”

Dirk opens his mouth and closes it again, a short but perfect disruption of his cool facade, accompanied by a fantastic dark flush on his ears. “Yeah. Well. We weren’t married. So.”

“Divorce-free mid-life crisis,” John says matter-of-factly, and nods along. Before Dirk can revisit the idea of bludgeoning him with the drill he’s still holding, John asks, “Do you still have your glass horse statue?”

“Marble,” Dirk says. “It’s in storage.”

He pulls an actual, honest laugh from John, and they both startle a bit at it. John isn’t here to fight it, though. It feels nice. He points at Dirk’s tattoo covered arm. “And is the wacky body mod you got in there?”

“Technically,” Dirk says, and gives his wrist a quick glance. “But I got it covered up.”

“Aw,” John says. “What was it?”

This time, the looks they pass in silence feel different. John is waiting for an answer again, sure, but Dirk feels less impenetrable now. Actually, John feels like he is being openly scrutinized, like Dirk is weighing out pros and cons in his mind and letting him know on his face.

Disappointingly, in the end, Dirk says, “Nah.” Less disappointingly, right afterwards, he adds, “Wine and dine me first.”

John’s face lights up. “Okay!” he says, so quickly it makes Dirk jump a little. “I will.”

“Okay,” Dirk echoes. He continues standing there, with his foot on the ladder and his hand around John’s drill, for another second, until he snaps out of something and moves to put the tools away. “Leave me another note under a plate if you mean it.”

The very next morning, John goes out and gets horse shaped cookie cutters, for his next plate of messaging cookies.

  
  


John has wined and dined people before -- mainly Roxy. He liked the idea of dressing fancy and impressing the person he liked, spending money on a good investment like that. Soon enough, though, Roxy stopped drinking, so wine was out, and John’s college budget was slimming, so dining stopped next. He and Roxy found other fun things to do, less pompous places that still served great food, cinema dates, and the occasional 3AM McDonald’s run. They all felt plenty romantic to John, and despite everything, he thinks they felt that way to Roxy, too.

John’s budget, since then, has grown considerably, of course, and Dirk has already gotten considerably drunk on beer next to him. He imagines, then, that wining and dining would theoretically be on the table, as Dirk said. But, again, that is pretty romantic, so it’s probably not what he meant.

They get fake Chinese food close to John’s work, because it’s the only place he knows here. John gets the check, just to make a point, and when he leans over conspiratorially and waggles his eyebrows at Dirk’s arm, Dirk snorts at him. John can’t see his eyes, because out here, Dirk wears a strangely elaborate pair of sunglasses, but he’s pretty sure he rolled them at him.

“Better luck next time,” Dirk says.

So the next week, they get hot dogs. John goes on a work rant about Jerry from HR while Dirk wipes mustard off his fingers and he has trouble looking away, but at least it’s a good excuse to ask him about his arm again.

“Better luck next time.”

By week four, John has forgotten all about the tattoo. By week four, watching Dirk eat his pineapple pizza with a knife and fork, he only knows that he is enjoying himself. Dirk will now sometimes tell him things about his work too, something about working on commission for orthopedic supplies, and John barely understands half of it, but he likes to listen to him talk.

  
  


“Those are dates,” Roxy says.

John says, “What!”

“John, what do you think they are?”

“Not dates!” John says into his phone. He is lying on his bed, smack in the middle of it, looking up at the ceiling lamp Dirk put there. “I specifically made sure to keep them non-romantic. We just get burgers and stuff.”

“We got burgers on dates,” Roxy points out.

“Yeah, but…” John says and trails off. He feels like any argument he’s going to make won’t fly with Roxy. He also feels like he maybe doesn’t want to argue super hard. He feels kind of okay about this.

“I love being right,” Roxy says instead. “You’re gay and I called it, sucker.”

“I never even protested that,” John says. Back when Roxy came out as non-binary, eventually, after a long talk, they asked if John would still love them. Back then, in perfect honest truth, John said,  _ Of course. _ So Roxy smiled and said,  _ Cool, that means you’re gay. _ “I don’t think I… I mean, he’s nice, but-- I dunno.”

“John,” Roxy says, “never once before have you called me only to tell me all about a person’s  _ freckles.” _

“I didn’t call you only for that! You were texting about having a cold and I wanted to check up on you. Jeez. So I happen to like freckles! You have them too. It’s an unfair weapon to use against me.”

He wonders if that’s weird to say, now, to his ex spouse, that he always liked their freckles. He still thinks they look very nice on them. That’s an alright thing to think, right? Roxy laughs at him.

“We all have a type, you loser, don’t make such a big deal out of it.”

“I guess so,” John says, and rubs his face with one hand, smile against his palm. His gaze shifts from the lamp to the spots on the ceiling he still hasn’t tried to either Windex or paint over. He pauses. “Hey…”

“Hmm?” Roxy says.

John sighs. He felt kind of okay about this just now, but it’s hard to keep the okay feelings steady sometimes. He says, “Is it too early to be dating again?”

“We are divorced,” Roxy informs him. “Look, Johnnyboy, I don’t think you need permission from me, but if you want it, you can have it. If he makes you happy, get as many of your no homo burgers with him as you want.”

_ If he makes me happy, _ John thinks. Then he clears his throat. That way lies madness. He grins into his phone instead. “Are  _ you _ dating?”

“Mayhaps,” Roxy says. John duly gives a scandalized gasp, but it’s all fake. They’re right, he thinks. He doesn’t mind them dating at all. If they’re happy, that’s all he could ask for.

“Who! Do I know them?”

“No, I don’t think so. Unless you two go to the same gym. They are mad fuckin’ jacked, dude.”

“More than me?”

“Way more than you, sweetie.”

“Well, shit,” John says. “Sorry I couldn’t be them. No wonder we couldn’t work it out, when I wasn’t working out enough.”

“Kinda wonky execution of that joke, buddy,” Roxy says. “I’ll introduce you two sometime if you want. Callie’s already jazzed to meet you.”

John smiles. “I’m jazzed too.”

  
  


It’s raining, so John’s plan to get nachos from a food truck didn’t work out too terribly well. Instead, he finds himself back on Dirk’s couch, eating Doritos and watching One Piece. Dirk told him about the prosthetic hand he’s been making, and John has been talking shit about Jerry again, and they’re sharing a bottle of what John thinks is incredibly shitty orange soda.

It’s not a date, of course. It can’t be a date unless both parties agree that it’s a date, John thinks. Possibly, Roxy had a point or two, but that doesn’t mean that John can just decide on his own what these meetings are called. Dirk probably doesn’t want to date! That would be most convenient, at least, because then John doesn’t have to make the decision of whether or not it’s an appropriate thing to do for him.

Either way, John is enjoying himself, which he thinks should be most important. He hasn’t been reading any of the subtitles on screen and has no idea what is going on in One Piece, but Dirk is nodding along when he talks, and the sides of their thighs touch again. John is, really, very much done with agonizing over romance questions, even if this situation is much more pleasant than blindly navigating through a divorce. He just wants things to be nice. That is the only word he needs for them, he thinks, right now. Nice and, perhaps, uncomplicated.

“He is just a piece of shit,” John surmises. “That’s just what he is! Right?”

“Jerry from HR is a dumb asshole,” Dirk says next to him. Eyes on the TV, cheek filled with Doritos. Comfortable. This is comfortable.

“Jerry from HR is a dumb,” John says, “asshole. He gets all on my case for missing a bit of work when everybody knows what’s been going on with me, and you know what else he does? He gives himself time off work!”

“No way,” Dirk says.

“Yeah! He gives himself the best shifts and then he just gives himself time off when he feels like it. He never has to call in sick! He just doesn’t come. And I am not a smart man, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what being in HR is about. Actually, I’m not even sure he’s HR, now that I think about it…”

Dirk says, “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.”

“Huh?”

When John turns his head to look at him, Dirk doesn’t look like he just said anything at all. He doesn’t even look like there’s been any sort of conversation, and for a second, John wonders if it all only happened in his head.

“It’s a quote,” Dirk says. Only he says it to John’s mouth. He looks at his face, but he looks at the lower half of it, so obviously that even John can tell. When did that happen? Just now, he was watching One Piece, but then apparently, the more John talked, the more he… what? Got distracted? By John’s mouth? Oh.

“Oh,” John says. Dirk looks up at the rest of his face, but he doesn’t flinch back like in the movies, doesn’t look caught. He knows what he’s been doing, and he knows that John knows. He’s not trying to take it back now, the look he gave him. John waits for him to say something, but he doesn’t do that either. He just… keeps looking, with those amber eyes of his, like he’s asking for permission. That’s not usually how that works, John thinks, you can’t do these things silently, but Dirk is already looking at his mouth again, and now John is looking at his too. John leans to the side, to put the Dorito he had in his hand back into the bag. He misses, and it drops to the floor. Neither of them reacts. John says, “Go ahead.”

Dirk doesn’t say anything else. Dirk just surges forward and kisses him.

John can’t remember his last kiss. He always tried to go for romance the way he saw it in movies -- the dates, the proposal, the wedding. He dipped Roxy for their wedding kiss, and then carried them over the doorstep when they got home, he even wanted to tie noisy aluminum cans to their car. Roxy was against it, because they felt it was a dick thing to do to everyone else. John just wanted to try out all the movie gestures he’d seen, but that never changed that he’s forgetful and kind of dense. He had to set many, many reminders to keep up with anniversaries. Even birthdays, sometimes. He’d do his best, but he’d forget Roxy’s favorite food, and how they liked to be kissed. And he forgot when he last kissed.

He knows it was Roxy, because he hasn’t kissed anyone since. And he knows it must have been a while ago. But as beautifully dramatic as it sounds to him to remember when he last kissed his ex spouse, he cannot for the life of him recall. It must have happened one day and then stopped happening as they fell apart, and now the memory is gone.

And perhaps, John thinks, when Dirk puts both of his hands on both of John’s arms and holds on to him like a man drowning at sea, that’s for the better. He doesn’t stop to compare, because there is nothing to compare it to. All he knows is that Dirk’s mouth is soft and tastes like Doritos, and people are yelling in Japanese again to his right, and in this moment, John wants to do nothing other than to kiss this loser.

Dirk pulls back again after the initial press of lips against lips, and immediately, John thinks, this won't do. The hands are still on his arms, and Dirk is still watching him with that searching look in his eyes, waiting for some sort of signal.

He can have a signal alright. John puts his hands on his chest, fingers splayed to feel solid warmth under them, and starts pushing Dirk back. It's awkward, what with them technically sitting next to each other on a couch, and their legs being in the way for this. But Dirk gets the picture quickly and starts rearranging himself, breaking the kiss only for brief moments when it's absolutely necessary, and soon enough, he's reclining on his couch the way John intended. With Dirk's legs bracketing him, John arches over him, one hand still on Dirk's chest while his other forearm holds his weight on the armrest just above Dirk's head.

It would be easy to get heated like this, but John goes slow, savoring. Dirk’s lips are chapped and so are his own, but his head is tilted and the slide is good, and Dirk moves his hands from John’s arms to instead run them over his shoulders, and John feels starved for touch. He hasn’t been feeling desperate in the physical sense much since the divorce, possibly just thanks to having other things on his mind, but he’s hungry for every little bit of this now. The breath on his face, the warmth radiating off of the body underneath him like a furnace, the subtle pressure of fingertips digging into his back -- he's missed this, and yet it's all new, double the excitement.

Dirk shifts his legs under him, probably just to get more comfortable, but John feels the movement nonetheless. A noise comes out of him, a content sigh right against Dirk's barely parted lips. Someone is having a deep monologue on TV, but he can still hear Dirk breathe. He could keep at this for a while, John thinks -- and then it stops.

Dirk’s hands come to the front of his shoulders, then push him back, mouths breaking apart. When John blinks his eyes open, he catches one last glimpse of Dirk’s tongue darting out and licking his lips, then sees him scrunch his eyes shut. He’s frowning, like he’s trying to figure something out, and John frowns back at him.

“Are you okay?”

Frown still in place, Dirk opens his eyes to peer up at him. “Yeah,” he says, quietly. Oh, John does not like this. “I-- Listen, I'm sorry, John.”

John  _ hates  _ this.

“What for? I told you to go ahead!”

“No, I know, but…” Dirk shifts again, sliding backwards on the couch just a little bit, getting more space between them. Reluctantly, John leans back as well, so he sits back on his haunches and stares down at him, waiting for an explanation. “This isn't right, I got you here under false pretenses, and I can't-- I shouldn't get away with that.”

John's heart sinks.  _ False pretenses  _ sounds very dramatic, but he has no idea what exactly Dirk is talking about. It's not like he has anything Dirk could be trying to exploit. He has seen John's barren bachelor apartment, and heard about his shitty office job. “What?” he says.

With a sigh, Dirk pulls one arm away from John to rub his eyes. His mouth twists, and John's stomach lurches at the realization of how much he just wants to lean down and kiss him again. “You think…” Dirk starts saying, his hand still covering his eyes. “It’s-- I’ve made you think-- No, I’m sorry, I can’t.”

_ Nobody has ever made me think, _ John almost says, but Dirk is pulling both hands away now and pressing his back against the couch like he’s trying to physically merge with it, and John knows what these signs mean. He’s not an asshole.

“I can’t be doing this,” Dirk is muttering, but John is already climbing off of him. A Dorito crunches quietly when his socked foot steps on it on his way off the couch.

“I’ll get out of your hair,” John says. Dirk’s absence feels cold on his legs. “Um. Sorry if I did anything.”

Dirk lies still, his knees pulled up, both hands pressed to his face, copper red hair falling over tan fingers. For a second, it looks like he might be shaking his head, but John isn’t sure. Yeah. Doesn’t look like he’ll be getting anything out of this guy tonight. That is a little bit worrisome.

“You know where to find me,” John adds, just in case. Just in case… whatever happens. Dirk makes a noise into his hands that John can’t read. He doesn’t want to guilt him into anything, so John tries to keep his sigh at bay as he shakes the Dorito crumbs from his foot and makes his way out of the apartment. He has no idea what the hell just happened, but maybe if he’s lucky, Dirk will explain it to him on his own time. If not, John might just forget about it.

He goes home, and he puts his socks in the laundry hamper. He makes coffee, and turns on the TV, and sits on his couch. He unlocks his phone and hovers his thumb over Roxy’s contact icon, but he doesn’t press it. He doesn’t drink his coffee. He lets it sit on his coffee table and cool down, while he also sits on his couch and cools down.

Thud.

John closes his eyes. Come on, Dirk.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

He grabs the remote and turns the TV up, blasting some rerun of a  _ Friends _ episode through the apartment. Then he wonders if Dirk can hear that upstairs, and how he feels about that. If Dirk is doing some important thinking, John wouldn’t want to disturb him, or seem like he’s having the time of his life down here. Then again, nobody has had the time of their life watching  _ Friends _ since about 2003.

Thud. Thud.

He doesn’t hear it as much as it seems to vibrate through the ceiling. When John looks up, he half expects his light to be swinging from side to side from the impact, but it’s perfectly still.

Thud.

“Do what you have to do,” John mumbles and gets up to put his coffee in the microwave. By the time it’s all gross and lukewarm again, the thudding has stopped, so John turns the TV down when he sits back on his couch. Ross is being an asshole to women again. John can’t remember why he ever thought this show was the shit.

Exactly in the brief moment of silence that results from him switching channels, he hears the familiar sound of paper sliding over floor from his entryway. John’s muscles respond before his brain does, and he jumps to his feet to find the note Dirk pushed in under his door. When he gets to it and his head catches up, John almost reaches out and tears his door open, hoping to catch Dirk on his way up the stairs.

But Dirk is fast, and, apparently, easily spooked. So if post-its is what they are going back to, John supposes he will just deal with that.

**You think I'm so helpful for getting over your**   
**divorce and I wish I was, but I suck ass at this.**   
**I'm really bad. John, the only reason I invited you**   
**in that first night was to get in your pants,**   
**because you look so much like my ex.**

John stands in his entryway and reads the note over thrice, absent-mindedly smoothing his thumb over the paper. This sure is some sort of a revelation. It does put a little twinge in his stomach, but he finds out quickly that it is easy to swallow down. He makes his way over to the kitchen, to find his own stack of paper and scrawl a reply.

**(your ex who you got the tattoo for?)**   
**ok! i guess that was kind of skeevy then.**   
**you didn't do that though! you let me ramble**   
**and then you really did help me and it was very nice!**   
**of you and for me. so i don't get why that would**   
**keep us from making out on your couch? do you**   
**still only want to kiss me because i look like him?**

His heart beats in his throat when he slides the paper in under Dirk’s door, and he knows it’s not because he ran up the stairs here. It’s weird to be arguing this, because he doesn’t want to push Dirk into any corners, but it just seems like Dirk’s arguments are really idiotic.

When he hears noises from inside, John hurries to scramble back down to his own apartment. He gets his pen and his papers from the kitchen, and sits down in the hallway. Dirk doesn’t make him wait long.

**(Yeah.)**   
**No, I want to kiss you because you're sweet**   
**and kind of an idiot and I'm into that. But**   
**this isn't right, man, this isn't how things**   
**should go. I'm sorry.**

John frowns. He was so ready to write more notes, cute ones like back in school, telling Dirk about why this is a great idea actually, and why he likes him and their dates have been fun and he doesn’t care that Dirk has trouble getting over exes because everyone does, and it’s fine. But this isn’t a conversation he wants to have on papers slid through underneath each other’s doors.  _ This isn’t how things should go? _ “Pretty good point, Dirk,” John says, dryly, into the silence of his apartment.

He writes one last note.

**this is stupid.**

As he pushes it in under the door, he listens for the rustle of Dirk’s movement behind it. Then, as soon as it’s close, he knocks with his entire fist.

Nothing happens. John knocks again. Behind the door, he can hear Dirk clear his throat. Idiot.

“Dirk, I will break this door down.”

“No, you won’t,” Dirk says, muffled, but not much. He’s right there.

“Yes, I will,” John says. “I have a hammer.”

“You can’t break a door down with a hammer.”

“You can break anything down with a hammer if you hit it hard enough.”

Another beat of nothing passes, then the door opens. Dirk looks as defeated as he looks softened, eyes on John, searching. “Come on in then,” he says quietly, “before you go  _ Here’s Johnny _ on my poor door.”

“Nice reference,” John says and marches in. Before Dirk can say any more stupid things, he turns towards him and says, “None of this is how things  _ should _ go, okay?”

Dirk’s adam's apple bobs as he swallows, and he doesn’t quite cross his arms, but he wraps them around himself, and hunches his shoulders. John wants to cross the little distance between them and take his hands instead, but he doesn’t. He has no words planned for this, but he has gotten this far through life by just letting his mouth do the talking, so he is going to rely on that.

“How things should go,” John says, “is I should stay with the person I married forever, and you should meet someone you love on first sight, and then live happily ever after. But it doesn’t happen like that, you romantic idiot.”

Something flickers over Dirk’s face. Disbelief, bemusement, perhaps, but John doesn’t have time to pay it much mind. Dirk may act like he isn’t a huge romantic, but the energy radiating off of his ridiculous post-its has been saying something else for a while.

“Life isn’t a movie!” John says. “We’re-- You and me both, we’re not bad people for trying to make it be like one, but at some point I think, maybe, we need to just get over ourselves. So you’re not my highschool sweetheart, and I’m not your, uh, fairytale prince or whatever, so what? I think you’re really great and good and nice and I miss kissing you even though it’s only been like half an hour. So can we just… Can we…”

He throws his hands up in defeat, and then, with movement so fast John’s eyes barely catch it, Dirk takes them. And Dirk uses them to pull John closer, and their chests make a weird noise when they bump into each other, and a soft, almost hysterical laugh bubbles out of John’s mouth as their lips meet.

As soon as Dirk lets go of his hands, John puts them on his back again, feeling the fabric of his shirt bunch under his palms. Dirk is warm, and his back is just a little bit damp, and he is such an idiot.

“Wannabe cartoon villain. You’re so stupid,” John says, barely understandable with his mouth still pressed to Dirk’s. But he’s sure he gets the gist.

Dirk’s arms are heavy on his shoulders, wrapped around him loosely, and it feels different this time, easier. They’re slow and they’re relaxed, and Dirk doesn’t hold on to him like a life raft. The tilt of his head is lazy instead, and John’s eyes slip shut, and then Dirk says, “No, you.”

When they break apart, it’s just barely, just enough to look at each other. Dirk’s eyes are half-lidded, no deer in the headlights, and it makes John lean in again for another quick peck. “Hey,” he says, fingertips tapping against Dirk’s spine. “Are you gonna tell me what that tattoo was now?”

Dirk tilts his head to the other side, but keeps looking at him, all calm and focused and deliberate, and it sends a rush of warmth down John’s back. The twitch in Dirk’s mouth that could almost be misconstrued as a smile really doesn’t help. “Nope,” he says quietly. “Better luck next time.”

John groans and rolls his eyes, but it comes with a laugh that feels much better in his chest than that crushed Dorito did on his foot. “Fine,” he says. “Will you at least tell me what the hell you get up to up here that I keep hearing weird thudding when I’m downstairs?”

“Oh, that,” Dirk says. He slides his arms off his shoulders, to take John by the hand again. “Come on.”

The way to his bathroom is familiar; John has been here a small handful of times, usually slightly intoxicated, to take a quick leak before returning to Crunchyroll and beer. Maybe that’s why he never noticed the enormous shower. Maybe it’s because it is closed off with an equally enormous door, which Dirk slides open smoothly. The inside is easily big enough to fit a small orgy, with dark tiles and numerous massage heads going up the wall, topped off with a large rain shower head that appears to include LED lighting. There is a seat in this shower that simultaneously looks fancy and waterproof, which is not a combination John sees or cares for often.

“This is my baby,” Dirk explains. “I always find something new to work on in here; right now I’m toying with pipes and water pressure.”

“You mean this is what you were working on just earlier?” John asks, blinking. Their apartments are built exactly the same, but his bathroom doesn’t look like this at all. This must have been so much work. “It doesn’t look like a construction site at all.”

“Nah, I always make sure to close it all back up when I’m done, so I can take my showers in peace whenever I like. It’s…” Dirk trails off, voice growing quiet and guarded again, and as he shrugs, John squeezes his hand. “It’s for fun, partly, and, you know. I kinda do this whenever I get, uh, worked up over things. Or people. Figured it’s more productive than getting shitty tattoos.”

“Probably,” John says. “You’re not half bad at this, you know!”

“I do build stuff for a living,” Dirk says. John squeezes his hand again and thinks about where his pillow is, downstairs. Thinks about how much better he has been sleeping since his bed belongs to him and him alone, since he sprawls out in the middle and doesn’t wait for anyone to join, doesn’t dream of spooning people he doesn’t love anymore. He thinks about how long of a process this has been and still is, how stupid it feels to still be getting over someone he’s not even interested anymore, and, in contrast, how nice it is to actively do something about it. He thinks about how this never would have occurred to him on his own, and he thinks that they are both just doing their best.

He says, “That’s not what I meant.”


End file.
